Humble Beginnings: Listening to the Founders We Love to Lecture

Audio By Carbonatix

Every generation inherits context from those who came before them. 

Whether it’s family stories, Scripture, great literature, or the founding documents of a nation, we have a choice. We can look and listen first. Or we can leap to lecturing—finger-wagging at both those who were present in the past and those present today. 

We are just so smart. Or we think we are. We assume we understand “they/then” perfectly, and then we assume we understand “us/now” inherently. 

You know what they say about assuming, right? It couldn’t be truer. 

Whether it’s the pontificating over the SCOTUS birthright citizenship ruling or the armchair litigators of Tik-Tok giving their brilliant, albeit terribly flawed understanding, of what a pretrial hearing is for Charlie Kirk’s assassin—what is clear is this. 

We don’t know jack. 

Or better said, we don’t know John. Or George. Or Jefferson. Or James. (Or Jesus, for that matter.)

We don’t know the men. 

We don’t know what they said or why. 

We haven’t read their words, we haven’t done the hard work of critical thinking or context finding near enough to quote them, much less lecture them about how we would have known and done better. 

Blame it on education or apathy. But there are huge swaths of the population that know our history only through tweets, truths, and threads—it is the meme-ification of intellect. And it makes our future as murky as it makes our past. 

“S” is for Shhh.

A nation of poor students with low scholarship and high confidence, we have become a nation very comfortable arguing about what we think the Constitution should say and far less competent in knowing what it actually does say. 

We assume we are experts at anything we can search up on the internet. 

Google. Then speak. That’s the sum total of our credentials and qualifications. 

And we do it while missing entirely that our founders and framers were some of the more highly educated, contemplative men who walked the earth. 

Free of distraction and the dumbing down of the mind via the smart phone, they read history and they studied habits. They devoured truth and learned what made nations great and what made great nations fall. 

They anticipated the problems we would one day grow into and planned for their solutions. 

Y’all, some of us are wearing jammies to Wal-Mart  during work hours while we bish* about the insufficiency of welfare and then tweet about how America ain’t that great. 

Shhhhhhh. Just stop. And think.

Wills and Quills

Read the letters, the speeches, the diaries and debates. The candid thoughts between John and Abigail Adams. The prayers and petitions that were cried before they could be run through the political ringer.

Y’all, we are drowning in primary sources that could help us understand our great nation. That’s the beauty of paper and pen, people!!

Say it loud, say it proud! DOC-U-MEH-ENTS!!!

We got ’em!!! Loads of them.

We actually can know the thought processes behind the decisions that were made—and subsequently made us.

We have the words…the hopes and fears…of the men and women who wrestled with building a nation unlike any the world had ever known.

Why would we ever want to ignorantly assume what can be so easily known for sure?

Take Them at Their Words

“Reading the Founders” isn’t the same thing as canonizing them. They are not a pox that must be shunned out of fear of contagion. (Though I suspect that’s exactly why our enemies want us to mark and avoid them…fear we might catch both courage and conviction.)

They were people. Not prophets.

They were not sinless and they did not need to be to be used mightily. Hey, King David. Hey! Also, Abraham, Moses, Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Like every generation since time began, they were human beings living within the limitations of their own time, sometimes fools who made sometimes wise decisions.

This is our story. This is our song.

God is so great He does not need better vessels to pour out His good will and works on mankind.

He builders grade clay like me. And you.

Honest About History

Never once, well only once if you want to be technical, have we honored a man because they were perfect. We have honored grit. We have honored sacrifice and endurance, courage and character…of the mortal and mere man.

We don’t honor the Founders by pretending they were perfect.

We honor them by telling the truth.

The truth about their strengths.

The truth about their failures.

The truth about what they actually believed.

And the truth about what they actually wrote.

Here is the real “colonial, capitalist kicker” though.

Many people who reject the Founders’ ideas still enjoy the blessings those ideas helped secure.

You may hate the men and methods for whatever ridiculous reason you have tethered yourself to. But you sit in the shade of liberty and opportunity their blood, sweat, and tears provides still.

As American As Humble Pie

We did not fight at Lexington.

We did not shiver beside Washington on Christmas night.

We did not pledge “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

We inherited the fruit of sacrifices we never had to make.

The freedom to worship.

To speak.

To publish.

To assemble.

To petition our government.

To argue about the Constitution itself….to wear jammies to Wal-Mart.

Those blessings were not inevitable. Someone paid dearly for them.

Grow up.

Maturity is learning to receive a gift without pretending the giver was perfect.

Humility is learning to receive that good gift with gratitude.

Better Together

Gratitude and honesty are not enemies.

In fact, they belong together.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve been so excited about Founders Month.

One of the unexpected joys has been rediscovering the actual voices of the men and women who shaped America’s founding—not as marble statues or political mascots, but as real people wrestling with extraordinary questions.

It’s also why I’m excited to support The Founders, a documentary that does something refreshingly simple.

It lets them speak.

Through their own letters.

Their own speeches.

Their own writings.

Before asking us what we think about them, it invites us to hear them.

Imagine that.

In an age overflowing with commentary, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is return to the source.

Hear them out.

Then decide.

Because whether we ultimately agree with every conclusion they reached isn’t the first question.

The first question is whether we’ve understood them well enough to disagree honestly.

And that seems like a remarkably humble, American place to begin.

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